Laws are there to be executed. And this execution must be done in the right way and should be explainable to the legislator, politicians and the citizen. In order to do this, the translation of law into execution must be recorded explicitly and in a structured manner. Law analysis is the approach that supports this.
Legislation is an important instrument to steer society in the right direction; it is not an end in itself but a means to achieve social goals. In order to execute legislation in an effective, lawful and explainable way, the necessary steps must be taken. This applies even more if ICT applications are used in the execution. Central government execution organisations such as UWV, DUO and the Tax and Customs Administration now have extensive ICT landscapes to handle the ever-increasing flow of decisions they take about citizens and businesses.
A good translation of legislation into execution requires an approach in which all steps for interpreting, specifying and further detailing legislation are explicitly recorded in a structured manner. This ensures that the choices made when translating legislation into execution are clear and that decisions made on the basis of these choices can be explained and justified. Another advantage of such an approach is that when legislation is amended, it is easier to determine what adjustments are needed in the ICT systems. This makes executing organisations more flexible when implementing legislation.
Law analysis consists of six steps:
Law analysis uses a law analysis scheme. In this scheme, various legal elements that occur in legislation are arranged in coherence. These elements form the classes that are assigned to formulations in the legislation in the context of law analysis. The classification of formulations into legal classes offers support in making the meaning of these formulations explicit.
One of the important aspects of law analysis is the multidisciplinary cooperation between lawyers, information analysts and ICT developers. This cooperation is essential for an optimal result of law analysis. On the basis of concrete examples and scenarios, they always discuss the results of the analysis and the interpretation of the legislation. This is of great importance for the quality of the analysis and thus for the correctness of the final implementation of the legislation.
Law analysis is not static, but will continue to renew itself under the influence of developments in legislation, application of the law and technology. The practitioners and developers of the approach work together to further refine and develop law analysis. Just as cooperation is essential in the concrete application of law analysis: always multidisciplinary and step-by-step.
Want to know more about law analysis? In 2021 Boom legal published a book in which, besides the theory, also the practice of law analysis is described. In addition to the approach, classification scheme and cooperation model, the book also describes two large cases in which the practical application of law analysis is shown. This book aims to make the approach to law analysis widely known to everyone who, in work or study, is involved with the application or execution of legislation. Although the emphasis is on the digital implementation of legislation by government execution organisations, it is also of value in legal and information science education at colleges of higher education, universities and postgraduate courses. The aim is always to build a bridge between the language of lawyers and the technology of ICT.